OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — A former custodian who disagreed with the secular content of a flower festival at Omaha’s St. Cecilia Cathedral has been fined for damaging it. The Omaha World-Herald reports that 59-year-old Mark Kenney was sentenced Thursday.
He’d pleaded guilty to criminal mischief. Kenney has said he was upset by the secular festival theme of “A Night at the Movies.”
He admitted that on Jan. 29 he cut a cable holding a suspended Mary Poppins figure, and it crashed to the cathedral floor. He then removed a cardboard Buddha figure from a chapel and tossed it and several costumed mannequins outside.
Kenney told the newspaper earlier this month that movie character images are inappropriate in the Roman Catholic cathedral because they amount to sacrilege and idolatry.